There are multiple projects sitting unfinished in almost every creative person’s past. Maybe an outlined book, or a story that got three chapters in and stopped. A comic book series that never reached the fourth panel. A game design document that fills a file and sits with good company on a hard drive.
If you grew up in a house like mine, someone looked at that unfinished thing and said, “You need to learn to finish what you start.”
They meant well. Follow-through matters a lot if you’re a contractor, and the world rewards people who complete things. But what they were missing is something I have spent years figuring out in myself and now see in my own son every day.
The project was never the point. The growth was.
The Creative Kid’s Real Curriculum
When a developing creative starts a project, they begin with what they know. They work with the skills, tools, and ideas they currently have. And then, if things are going well, they start to outgrow the project. New skills emerge. New possibilities open up. The original concept feels too small for what they now understand. They’ve developed a new wineskin, and the current container cannot hold what they’ve become.
That is not failure. That is exactly what creative development is supposed to look like.
When my son starts something and moves on before it’s finished, I’ve learned to ask a different question than the one I grew up hearing. Not why didn’t you finish it? But what did you learn while you were working on that? The answers are almost always remarkable. He learned something about a coding language or piece of software. He solved a problem in the story logic he had been stuck on. He figured out a mechanism that opens a whole new direction. The project may not have gotten finished, but he grew in knowledge, skill, capability, and most importantly, creativity. At some point, while working on that unfinished project, he had ideas and began working them out in his head, deciding they were more interesting or perhaps more challenging problems that would more adequately meet his new level.
Telling a young man or woman to always finish creative projects can halt the learning process and discourage them from starting projects that better align with their current skills and abilities and would take them even further.
When Writing Felt Like Work
I had no idea writing was fun until someone stopped grading me on it, and then I began wanting to be graded on everything I wrote because I wanted to be better at it.
For most of my early education, writing meant assignments. It meant formats. It meant being evaluated on punctuation, grammar, and sentence structure before I had ever been given a reason to care about any of those things. The mechanics came before the meaning. The rules came before the desire.
And then at some point, later than it should have been, I discovered that writing was the closest thing I had found to putting what was in my heart into someone else’s. That the right sentence could make a reader feel something I had felt. I discovered that words, arranged with enough care, could move something from my head and heart directly into theirs.
After that discovery, I started caring deeply about grammar, punctuation, and structure. Not because someone was testing me on them. Because I wanted the transfer to be precise. I wanted nothing to get in the way between what I meant and what the reader received. The mechanics became tools I wanted to master, because I had something I desperately wanted to communicate. And like any creative writer, I wanted to know the rules so I could break them at just the right times.
Some people discover they have a natural ability early. A child who draws exceptionally well at an early age will get praise and attention from teachers, while the child who loves drawing more but is still in the stick-figure stage gets pushed into the pile of kids who “just don’t have it,” and tragically, the child believes and agrees with it, never pursuing that passion again. I believe we’ve missed out on many great artists and amazing authors because of this.
There isn’t a single Kindergarten-through-12th-grade teacher of mine who thought for a second that I would go to college, much less earn a master’s degree in English and Creative Writing with a 3.87 GPA. I didn’t care about underlining a subject and verb in some sentence, or where a comma or period goes. My passion didn’t come from learning the rules. My passion for the rules came from having something worth saying.
Your child has something worth saying.
This is the thing that most traditional writing instruction gets exactly backward. And it is the thing we try to get right at Compass Life Skills. The fact that you are reading this already suggests that “something traditional” may not be what you are seeking for your creative child.
What a Creative Kid Actually Needs from You
My son is now sixteen years old, and he’s building and leading design and video game-creation teams for passion projects. He’s inspiring other creative young men and women to join him in developing his ideas. I love watching his creative projects become real experiences in leadership, communication, conflict resolution, networking, and relationship-building. He talks to me constantly about his projects and who is working on what. Games he’s building. Characters he’s designing. Stories he’s developing. Worlds he’s constructing with rules, histories, and internal logic that I sometimes cannot follow because his knowledge in those areas far surpasses my own.
I have noticed something in other parents, and I have felt it myself. The child is more advanced than we are in their specific domain, and that creates a strange combination of pride and discomfort. So, we give loving answers that may not go very deep. That’s amazing. I love it. You’re so talented, you’re so smart. And we mean it. But we stay on the surface because we’re not sure we can go any further, because we don’t want to reveal how truly lost all this is on us, or we just don’t know what to say to engage with the information.
What I’ve found is that you don’t have to understand the code to be a real audience for a creative kid. You don’t have to know the fandom, the game mechanics, or the programming language. You listen for the thing you do understand and go deep there.
I understand and love story. Not only stories, but I love story itself and how it all works. I understand character. I understand motivation and world-building and why a choice is interesting or flat. So, when my son tells me about a character he’s designing, I don’t just say, “That’s cool.” I ask why. Why does she look that way? What does the way she looks tell us about who she is or where she is from? How does she fit into the cast around her? What does she want that she’s not saying out loud?
Creative children are used to being asked what. When someone asks why and means it, and waits for the answer, something opens up. He thinks harder. He goes deeper into his own work. He discovers things about what he’s making that he didn’t know were there.
That isn’t me teaching him. It’s me being a genuine audience. And a real audience is what a creative kid needs more than almost anything else.
There is a difference between that’s amazing, honey and wait, tell me more about that. The first one feels good for a moment. The second one says, “I take your ideas, voice, and work seriously. I believe it’s worth thinking about. I am interested in where you are going, not just proud of where you are.”
What We Are Trying to Do at Compass
I do most of my creative writing while running, lifting in the gym, driving on long road trips, cutting my lawn, or playing a repetitive, mindless video game I’ve played for decades. I may not be literally writing, but what I am doing in my head is writing. I’m building characters, getting to know them, and developing the world around them. It may look like I’m staring out a window, but I’m writing. It’s not until I get enough notes in my head and solve enough story problems that I just can’t stand to not start putting words on paper. That’s my process, and we want to help discover your child’s current process as well.
Everything I’ve learned about my creative process, what unlocks it, what wounds it, what I wish I had understood when I was young, all shape how we approach creative development at Compass Life Skills.
We believe that everyone has a story to tell, and every story begins with something worth saying; the fundamentals of grammar will follow from caring about being understood. We want to inspire your child to tell stories and help them acquire the tools to do so.
We do this because homeschool families aren’t choosing Compass for more of what school already does. They are choosing something different. A different philosophy. A different relationship between the student and their own creative voice.
The creative kid sitting across from you has something to say. Our job, yours and ours together, is to make sure nothing gets in the way of them learning to say it.
If this connected with you, I would love to stay in touch. Drop your email below, and I will send you more information about how we approach creative development and which creativity and life-skill development courses are coming next at Compass.
Daniel Shaw, Co-Founder, Compass Life Skills
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